In Lost Highway there's a corridor in the saxophophist's flat. It's no ordinary corridor. It pulses. It could swallow you up. You watch it like a child, scared of the dark, suspecting that if you go down this corridor and through whatever door lies on the other side, you're in for all kinds of trouble.
In Inland Empire, Lynch hasn't even bothered to show us the corridor. He's gone straight down it and from the moment the film starts, we're there, on the other side.
The film opens with grainy footage from what appears to be a hotel room. A man and a woman with their heads pixillated into a blur. It cuts to a room which looks like a stage set, where three people wearing rabbit heads iron, sit, talk. Canned laughter interrupts them. Back in the room, the woman begins to undress. She says she's scared. Laura Dern's neighbour rings on her doorbell. Welcome to Lynch world.
Which, the film is very clear in stating (in a film that is very clear about little) is also Hollywood. The Hollywood sign makes a guest appearance. Much of the action occurs on a studio sound stage. Dern's death scene, or one of her character's death scenes, occurs on Hollywood Boulevard itself, next to the faded glory of a star's sign on the pavement.
Watching this film is a hunt for clues. One of the clues is that this is a movie about/ within Hollywood, and the reality distortions that place conduces. When you're in a movie you inhabit unreality, which is the stuff of dreams, which is what this film undoubtably is. As Dern leapfrogs from scene to scene, sometimes a movie star, sometimes a character, sometimes a doomed drifter, she often appears to be looking at the action rather than participating in it. Her eyes are the eyes of the dreamer, and Lynch invites us to wander through the rooms of the dreamer's mind.
Which dreamer? Is another question. Who is the Polish girl? What are the Polish characters doing at all? The filmmaker who watched Inland Empire with me speculated that this was the aborted film within the film which the film within the film (which Laura Dern stars in and Jeremy Irons directs) adapts. He might be right, he might be wrong. These potshots at the film's 'meaning' are all we can take, unless we were PhD students doing a full and proper exegisis, as one kind of hopes there one day will be.
Watching Inland Empire hoping to find its 'meaning' feels like a foolish endeavour. Lynch, as in all his work, is smart enough to know that an audience can't help but bring their instinct for plot-resolution with them. Normally he throws them enough bones to make them think they've got a chance of digesting some kind of sense. You don't know what's going on but you can at least hazard an informed guess. Here, the wise course of action is to give up before you die trying. His tongue-in-cheek credits sequence teases the viewer. Inland Empire is self-consciously opaque; non-sense, if you like, tied together by the fact that every frame constitutes a connection with the other frames contained within the material of the film.
No other filmmaker in Hollywood could get away with this sort of gibberish. The very fact that Lynch can throws a fly in the Hollywood soup. Film is not about neat story lines and coherent story telling. It is about an amalgamation of images, knitted together to produce something that looks like a whole, but is as full of gaps as any dream. Only Lynch brings you the gaps. Which makes it more representative of a dream. Which might mean it's more truthful. Or might mean we're but children of the filmic age, and in a hundred years time they'll complain that Lynch was good, if a little obvious at times.
In Inland Empire, Lynch hasn't even bothered to show us the corridor. He's gone straight down it and from the moment the film starts, we're there, on the other side.
The film opens with grainy footage from what appears to be a hotel room. A man and a woman with their heads pixillated into a blur. It cuts to a room which looks like a stage set, where three people wearing rabbit heads iron, sit, talk. Canned laughter interrupts them. Back in the room, the woman begins to undress. She says she's scared. Laura Dern's neighbour rings on her doorbell. Welcome to Lynch world.
Which, the film is very clear in stating (in a film that is very clear about little) is also Hollywood. The Hollywood sign makes a guest appearance. Much of the action occurs on a studio sound stage. Dern's death scene, or one of her character's death scenes, occurs on Hollywood Boulevard itself, next to the faded glory of a star's sign on the pavement.
Watching this film is a hunt for clues. One of the clues is that this is a movie about/ within Hollywood, and the reality distortions that place conduces. When you're in a movie you inhabit unreality, which is the stuff of dreams, which is what this film undoubtably is. As Dern leapfrogs from scene to scene, sometimes a movie star, sometimes a character, sometimes a doomed drifter, she often appears to be looking at the action rather than participating in it. Her eyes are the eyes of the dreamer, and Lynch invites us to wander through the rooms of the dreamer's mind.
Which dreamer? Is another question. Who is the Polish girl? What are the Polish characters doing at all? The filmmaker who watched Inland Empire with me speculated that this was the aborted film within the film which the film within the film (which Laura Dern stars in and Jeremy Irons directs) adapts. He might be right, he might be wrong. These potshots at the film's 'meaning' are all we can take, unless we were PhD students doing a full and proper exegisis, as one kind of hopes there one day will be.
Watching Inland Empire hoping to find its 'meaning' feels like a foolish endeavour. Lynch, as in all his work, is smart enough to know that an audience can't help but bring their instinct for plot-resolution with them. Normally he throws them enough bones to make them think they've got a chance of digesting some kind of sense. You don't know what's going on but you can at least hazard an informed guess. Here, the wise course of action is to give up before you die trying. His tongue-in-cheek credits sequence teases the viewer. Inland Empire is self-consciously opaque; non-sense, if you like, tied together by the fact that every frame constitutes a connection with the other frames contained within the material of the film.
No other filmmaker in Hollywood could get away with this sort of gibberish. The very fact that Lynch can throws a fly in the Hollywood soup. Film is not about neat story lines and coherent story telling. It is about an amalgamation of images, knitted together to produce something that looks like a whole, but is as full of gaps as any dream. Only Lynch brings you the gaps. Which makes it more representative of a dream. Which might mean it's more truthful. Or might mean we're but children of the filmic age, and in a hundred years time they'll complain that Lynch was good, if a little obvious at times.
1 comment:
"I figured one day I'd just wake up and and find out what the hell yesterday was all about. I'm not too keen on thinkin' about tommorow. And today's slippin' by. "
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